JD When I came to your studio in Hackney Wick, we had an engaging and informative
conversation about reductive art from the mid twentieth century to recent times.
We related this discussion to your national and international exhibition history,
and your values, influences and approaches to making art. We discussed the studio
work for your upcoming exhibition: When Colour Becomes A Beautiful Object. And An
Object Becomes A Beautiful Colour, at Flowers Gallery, London, opening on 4th September,
2015. This exhibition is new work, comprising sculpture and works on paper that negotiate
the “boundaries between painting and sculpture and the formal interactions of colour,
shape and surface” (press release, Flowers Gallery, 2015).

For this interview for Saturation Point, I’d like to focus, in no particular order,
on your aim or intention; your field of creative inquiry; the methods you employ;
why you do what you do; outcomes; and general information about you.

Describe your new project and how it emerged?

CC The last show at Flowers Gallery -When Painting Collapses, You Have Beautiful
Sculptures - was all about the materials (of the scaffolding and what the balls
were held in). I needed to take this further and focus on the object of colour and
the relationships between colours. The work for the upcoming show -When Colour
Becomes A Beautiful Object. And An Object Becomes A Beautiful Colour -includes wall-mounted
works which are channels in either black and white or stainless steel, holding coloured
spheres. They started out as free-standing, but now I am much more excited about
them as wall pieces. When I put them on the wall, I discovered space around them;
people who come to see them have to bend their neck to see the side - it’s intriguing.

The screen prints for the new show are related to the wall pieces. I’ve said: “how
do I take this object that is incredibly strong, and flatten it?”, and it’s given
something to me that I’m really excited about. It isn’t just a replication of the
object, I’m saying: “here’s a sculpture and here’s another piece which comes from
it, from a different perspective.”

Cedric Christie, When Painting Collapses, You Have Beautiful Sculptures, Installation
View, 2013, Photograph by Paul Tucker, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New
York

JD In our discussion you referred to the influence of the American artist Donald
Judd on modern and contemporary reductive art. Judd was the leading exponent of minimalism
in New York in the early 1960s. You also referred to the lack of impact of minimalism
in British art. This seems to be a common cry throughout the world, helping to explain
the persistence of concrete and non-objective art practices across all media. Has
modernist abstraction become an excavation site for further analysis within newer
contexts, without the rhetoric that once accompanied it? Some of your works appear
to suggest this.

Given the reductive nature of your work, your references to geometry and architectural
space, the exploration of colour, form and surface, the use of everyday objects and
industrial materials, and your experimentation with the genre, how do you situate
your practice within the present day?

CC The mantle of Judd is like the mantle of Duchamp. Duchamp intellectually owns
the ready-made (although you can argue about that) and Judd owns minimalism, or has
been put on a pedestal. So there are two ways that I choose to look at it – you can
either say: “all bow down to Judd”, or you can say: “I want Judd’s position”. Judd’s
position is so locked in to the space, time and politics of his era, that as much
as I admire what he has done, I would need to have been making it in the 60s/70s
with him. So I ask: “how do I move this on for me?”

I live in the 21st century, I live in London now – how do I present those ideas back
to people (outside of America) who have a different idea of modernism? The way I’ve
been looking at it is that it’s slightly broken, and so for it to exist for me now,
it needs to be slightly wrong - not quite resting in that moment of peace. It’s an
idea of making an object that can occupy that space of contemplation without you
having to ask what it is – just allowing it to be, which seems to be the biggest
challenge.

To have had work in a show with Judd has helped me to understand the foundations
to enable me to walk, to take my own steps.

Cedric Christie, Pink Painting, 1996-2009, Photograph by Paul Tucker, Courtesy of
Flowers Gallery, London and New York

JD We know that the use of steel and industrial pre-fabricated materials were
adopted by the early minimalists to eliminate evidence of craftsmanship in the work
of art, enabling it to stand alone. How has your early occupation in the metal trades
influenced what you do?

CC I think it has totally influenced what I do, because I have a practical understanding
of the materials. The nice challenge for me in making art, is that you have the ability
not to put (industrial materials) in their correct order, but to give them their
own value as a material. Normally things go together or fit to make things work,
but I can choose when it works or how it works.

JD Following on from that, explain your attraction to motoring and motor cars
as a vehicle for visual communication. For example, the ‘muscle car’ which features
in your portfolio. Further, Pink Painting is a crushed car presented as a wall work.
That car, and others displaying text, were exhibited at Documenta Bootleg, in Kassel,
2007.

CC Cars are interesting to me because of what a car means: its one of the few objects
which you buy and then try as hard as possible to keep the same as it was when you
bought it. I grew up with this whole thing that “you are the car you drive”.

It seems that the muscle car was all about an idea of power and wealth – and sex
- the idea of a muscle car is attractive. I am thinking about it as a kind of a medal
– and what is a car if it isn’t a medal?

The first project with a car started when I had a car given to me by General Motors
for the Art Car Boot Fair, and I had to do a project with it. So I went to galleries
and said “I’m doing this project, this is the deal: it’s going to cost you this much
money to get involved, and you have no control over what’s going to happen.” The
first gallery to say yes was Faggionato’s – I just went into Gerard Faggionato’s
gallery, I didn’t really know him. He said: “You’ve come into my gallery, you want
me to give you money and I don’t know what’s going on?” And I said “yeah”, and he
said: “OK then, I’ll do it.”

The logos I put on the cars were part of the idea of the artist as a brand. It was
a very public piece. On the one hand you have the public who look at it and say “I
know this, it’s Esso or Golf, but I don’t know Serra, what’s Serra?” And then the
art world who look at it and say “why is it saying Picasso?” They are both saying:
“that’s part of my world, but it’s not my world” – and it was a moment of fusion
that a car has an ability to do.

From that project I looked at how I could take it slightly further. Most people’s
ideas of modern art, through to contemporary, involves artists who have exhibited
at Documenta. So I bought a car to represent each year of Documenta, (the door number
was the year, and under that was the curator of that year, and on the car the racing
logos were the names of the artists from that Documenta, from 1955 up to 2007).
What was interesting was that as the cars got newer, the artists got less well known.
The ’55 car was established, part of our modern history…

Cedric Christie Black Crayon, 2015 (c) Cedric Christie, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery
London and New York

Cedric Christie White and Red, 2015 (c) Cedric Christie, Photograph by Paul Tucker,
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

JD The new works, incorporating glossy, coloured spheres housed within strategically
hung, hand-painted brackets of angled steel, are three-dimensional wall works that
play on our perception of colour. It seems they are a continuation of other projects
about this topic. Describe the series, in terms of new developments, and how they
communicate in the gallery space.

CC In the earlier pieces with snooker balls, I bought the material that I housed
these objects in (the actual channel). The nice thing about the new works is that
I’ve made the channel. That takes it into a whole different space as an object. It
also becomes more about the colour selection. What becomes really nice about it,
is that you identify the object with things that you know by their colours, and you
start associating them with the objects. In the blue and white one I instantly saw
the 350 Shelby Mustang. It’s like the colour has its own life within the object that
it’s been placed next to. The white on white is like the Cadillac Eldorado, which
is beautiful and glossy – I like that idea, that the colour has a previous ownership.

JD Titles feature in the overall impact of your work. They sometimes mirror each
other, contradict, or refer to predicaments of art history. For example, When Painting
Collapses You Have Beautiful Sculptures. Describe your reason for incorporating text,
either into the title or a body of work?

CC Text is something that I find interesting because it’s the way that you come
to history – but it’s also the way that you can misguide or misplace someone. And
I don’t use text to complete the work – there is usually a gap, where the viewer
completes the circle. I give it 95% and the viewer gives it 5%.

I keep notebooks with thoughts/words. And I connect the two. I think: this will jar
that work, and create a space in between what you know and what you don’t know. A
kind of invisible material to the object.

JD Looking through your exhibitions, line appears in many works, as grids, curves,
rope, pipe, symbols, text, geometry, line-ups of objects. What is the significance
of your use of line?

CC I think it’s a direct thing that can be said in that one moment. That’s a personal
thing for me - how much do I have to say, when there it is - it’s all there in that
moment. Lots of lines: it is saying more? Is ‘more’ better? There are times when
more is better and there are definitely times when more isn’t better.

Line is something that has always been there since the First Maximum Break, which
was a line, or a sequence. If the line is absolutely right, it is absolutely ‘on
it’ for me. The grid has become something that is really important, because it is
now reducing space so that it can define its own space.

Cedric Christie, When Painting Collapses, You Have Beautiful Sculptures, Installation
View, 2013, Photograph by Paul Tucker, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New
York

JD Finally, as an established artist, you have strong views about the social responsibility
of the art establishment. As a visiting professor at Bath Spa University, what advice
do you have for emerging artists forging a career?

CC I think that you have to be prepared to mess up. And just want it. If you need
to get something back then it’s not incredible, because you’re not in control of
it. You’re in control of what you can give it, but not what it can give you back.

Cedric Christie: When Colour Becomes A Beautiful Object. And An Object Becomes A
Beautiful Colour is at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, W1, from 4 September to 3 October
www.flowersgallery.com

Cedric Christie White, 2015 (c) Cedric Christie, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London
and New York

Cedric Christie, Blue, 2015, Stove enamelled stainless steel, Photograph by Paul
Tucker, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York